Palmerton clothing mill goes idle

Manufacturer blames foreign competition for loss of work.

The last batch of Alfred Dunner pants sewn at Blue Ridge Sportswear in Palmerton were tagged and bagged Thursday morning, and the last of the manufacturer's 65 employees were laid off and sent home.

The small textile plant has become the latest regional victim of a suffering economy and the long-standing trend of shifting garment manufacturing overseas, where workers earn a small fraction of American wages.

Blue Ridge office manager Rita Spinelli said the company ran out of work, and doesn't know when more might come.

"It's all been going overseas," Spinelli said. "The manufacturers have to do what they have to do."

For company co-owner Jose Amorim, Blue Ridge was the American dream.

An immigrant from Portugal, Amorim was a fabric cutter at Blue Ridge for six years before joining two other employees five years ago to buy the company from owner Bernie Filler, who had owned it since the 1970s.

On Thursday the business sat idle. Amorim's wife, Theresa, a sewer at Blue Ridge, was among those laid off.

"It was like a family," Theresa Amorim said, looking over the rows of machines still outfitted with blue thread for the last batch of pants.

Spinelli said the plant on Fifth Street could produce 12,000 pairs of pants in a week, but in recent years had to lay off workers for a day or a week at a time because there was not enough work.

Textile plants, once a large part of the region's manufacturing economy, have been closing steadily for years as manufacturers shift work overseas.

"We've suffered tremendous job losses in the past decades," said Gail Meyer, vice president for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, based in Allentown. "Little by little the shops closed."

She said the union is asking Blue Ridge employees to send letters and personal photographs to Alfred Dunner, based in New Jersey, hoping to persuade the company to send more work to Palmerton.

Spinelli said some of Blue Ridge's employees have been there for decades, and some are disabled people specially trained to work in the textile plant.

"We have one woman who started here when she was 16, and she's been here 36 years," Spinelli said.

If the layoff continues or the company closes, workers could become eligible for training assistance and other benefits if they can show the state that they lost their jobs because of overseas competition.